Why Small and Local Business Digital Marketing Campaigns Fail

Digital Marketing is loosely defined as: “marketing products or services using digital channels to attract consumers.” Your objective as a Digital Marketer is to promote your brand, product, service, offer using various forms of digital media like mobile phones (both SMS and MMS), social media marketing, display advertising, email marketing, search engine marketing, and any other form of digital media.

Digital Marketing requires a fundamentally new approach to selling and a new understanding of modern customer behavior and how today’s consumers use their devices to find products and services and ultimately guide their buying decisions. Digital Marketing requires business to analyze AND quantify data like Click Through Ratios (CTR) for Pay Per Click Advertising, downloads of apps on mobile devices, tweets on Twitter, page likes on Facebook and so more.

While Local businesses know they should be “advertising online”, they simply do not have the budget or expertise to do so effectively and, for the most part, the newspaper,TV, radio or YP.com rep selling to them is under tremendous pressure to hit digital sales quotas without any real understanding of what the right digital product is for a specific local business and why.

Not all businesses are the same, and a “one-size-fits-all” packaging format often used to sell to local businesses will net different results for each business. A Personal Injury Lawyer and a local Dentist need very different campaigns with different budgets to yield results that will satisfy each advertiser. Most local businesses are being sold a cocktail of Pay-Per-Click(PPC), Social Media/Facebook and SEO without any real understanding of what each channel’s role is in the consumer buying process and what the appropriate budgets are for each channel.

Example: Personal Injury Cost-Per-Clicks in Miami can average $20 per click. So, if industry averages are 10 clicks to produce a lead and 10 leads to a sale, then how effective will a $1000 budget be for a local PI Attorney? At $1000 he’s generating ONLY 5 real leads. Needing 10 good leads to close one, he’s going to be working really hard. How long do you think he’s going to continue? The result? A failed Digital Marketing campaign.

Local business do not generally have an “advertising budget”. What they spend on advertising is REAL INCOME. It’s critical when helping them plan their digital marketing that you first know what they can afford to spend. Then help them calculate their Cost Per Acquisition(CPA) = how much does it cost to make each sale. Then calculate their Average Customer Value (ACR) and Lifetime Customer Value (LCR). Knowing this information helps you to determine which Digital channel will most likely generate the best ROI and help them stay committed to that channel.

By understanding identifying your customer’s REAL budgets, you will spend that budget the RIGHT way, targeting the RIGHT channel, at the RIGHT time, for the RIGHT results. You will provide significant ROI for your local business and end the cycle of churn and failed Digital marketing campaigns.